Domain: geocities.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to geocities.com.
Comments · 8,978
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Silver Lining around the Dark CloudThe migration of information-technology (IT) jobs to places like India and Taiwan has a positive end-result. Consider the following two scenarios.
- IT jobs remain in the United States of America (USA). American companies and especially small companies funded by Taiwanese money demand that H-1B workers be allowed to come to the USA in droves in order to fill a supposed shortage of workers.
- IT jobs are exported to places like India and Taiwan. The H-1B visa program is shut down.
In both scenarios, native Americans are denied jobs that they deserve; however scenario #2 is actually better than scenario #1. Scenario #1 has fostered the growth of large ethnic communities that refuse to assimilate into American society. They consist largely of people who believe that Western culture is only for "white" people and who teach their kids that they should identify with their "ethnic" culture and people. These large ethnic communities also produce most of the spies who steal Western technology to give to Beijing. The two spies mentioned in "Two Men Arrested for Planning to Smuggle High-Tech Encryption Devices to China" grew up in Taiwan and came to the USA.
Scenario #2 will result in a reduction of those ethnic communities. This reduction does not mean that, for example, Chinese will not want to come to the USA. On the contrary, Indians, Chinese, Taiwanese, etc. will still demand to be allowed into the USA in huge numbers even though there will be plenty of IT jobs in India, China, Taiwan, etc. Why? Our Western way of life is superior to what exists in Indian, China, Taiwan, etc. Please read "Hospitals see mass resignations" and "SARS doctors' ethics put to the test" to sample the quality (or lack thereof) of life in Taiwan. Instead of treating SARS victims, the doctors prefer to hide the information about the illness or to resign.
As Slashdotters, let us work together as a community and lobby Congress to terminate the H-1B program and to reduce the combined immigration quota of China (which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan) from 60000 to 2000. Let us encourage companies like Intel to pursue scenario #2 instead of scenario #1. Intel has frequently lied about the need for H-1Bs. In the future, if Intel needs H-1Bs, Intel should set up a plant in India.
... from the desk of the reporter -
Re:Makes no sense
Yeah, I'm sure most all toasters are using multiprocessor support!
Not all of them.
Would you like some toast? -
Re:Huh
Or there's always the good old Fire thread.
Happy afternoon-wasting... -
Re:NASA Has been in trouble for a whileOnce you strip the need to carry cargo, the shuttle suddenly shrinks. This actually makes too much sense, I wish it could be so. The fact is the shuttle was, is and unfortunately probably will continue to be a cash cow that is more politics than a workable solution. We do have heavy lift capability with rockets, though I think we can do better. The ISS still needs to be completed, and probably expanded for the addition of short term experiments. A new "shuttle" that has a primary function of transporting live people, docking with the ISS and being re-usable would be ideal. Because of the smaller agenda you could add many more safety featurs, including the beloved glider separation ( http://www.design-career.com/interior_design/deck
_ design/deck_design_msg15946/deck_design_msg15946.s html , here , here , ). I live in Houston, and the second shuttle disaster of my lifetime is even harder to take than the first. Especially when you are smart enough to know that it is entirely possible to avoid the accidents of the past. -
Without virus writers, who would we have to hate?Here's a little article I found by someone who doesn't seem very grateful for the services virus writers are providing here.
I'd have to say I agree with the sentiment--these people are losers (I'd use stronger language, but
... I don't use stronger language) and we should call them such. The fact that the good guys can make something good come out of something bad, doesn't make that bad thing good, and it certainly doesn't earn the least bit of gratitude for the losers who prefer to create trouble than help fix it.The people we should be grateful to are the one's who respond to the virus writers--they're the one's that make us stronger.
If your hard drive is wiped out by a virus, if you lose irreplacable data, if you have to waste time removing a virus, are you supposed to smile and say "I'm sure glad I had this opportunity to get stronger"? If these people want to earn ANY gratitude AT ALL, they should be writing COMPLETELY benign virii, if anything--perhaps install something that generates a popup whenever someone's computer launches that tells the person that their computer is vulnerable, and tells them where to find the info/tools to fix it. And don't hog all sorts of bandwidth in the process of spreading the good word. If these people had the decency to carefully construct tools to do this, and ensure that they weren't going to cause problems, you might convince me to be grateful. Till then, they're losers.
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Re:And I thought red light cameras were a nuisanceAnd don't tell me that the traffic light turning yellow and then red doesn't give you enough time to break.
It can when the yellow length is deliberately shortened to induce violations. The real solution is to increase the yellow length, assuming the goal is to prevent accidents and not generate revenue. -
Infinite Improbability drive...
There's an old axiom in fiction writing which says it's okay to ask a reader to believe the impossible but not the improbable. For example, it's okay to say that a maniac has activated an antimatter bomb in the wall safe, but it's not okay to say that someone miraculously guessed the right combination on the first try.
But if you could get your hands on an infinite improbability drive, and set it to the right level of improbability, the combination may be 1,2,3,4,5, which by some strange coincidence, is the same combination as your luggage.
After all, it is reported in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Gallaxy that after Aurthur hit the infinite improbibility drive, the two missiles that were persuing his ship turned into a giant sperm whale and a bowl of petunias. (While the whale had various thoughts, oddly enough the only thing the bowl of petunias had was 'Oh no, not again'.)
For more information, including how to make an improbability drive, please refer to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
Infinite Improbabity Drive -
I for one ...
Welcome our telepathic and precognitive overlords who can forsee when we are about to make a joke about
Wait, I can't post that, must resist the urge to ...
^H^H^H^H^ H^H^H^ H^H^H^H^H^H^ H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^H^H^ H^H^H^H^ H^H^H ^H^H^H^H^ H^H^H^H^H^ H^H^H^H^H^ H^H^H^H^H^H
Oh fine I'll post something on topic:
You too can actually learn from the Brisbane Insects and Spiders Home Page -
Re:Nobody Expects...
Third Official: Well most things we do for pleasure nowadays are taxed, except one.
Politician: What do you mean?
Third Official: Well, er, smoking's been taxed, drinking's been taxed but not ... thingy.
Tax on Thingy -
Keeping doctors away
> Does it just keep other doctors away? Do you explode?
Maybe you end up as the one who shaves the barber . -
Will the online arhive include live music?If the open archive features BBC sessions archive, it will be TREMENDOUS.
Over the years, BBC has gathered tons of live performances by everyone from Beatles to Rolling Stones to Pink Floyd to The Sisters of Mercy to Nirvana, most bootlegged to death, some never even broadcast.
As the archives are rehauled for putting online, some gems are sure to be discovered ("lost" footage of the archives comes up from time to time, this will be perfect time for it).
Live BBC sessions were started to be released officially (Led Zeppelin, Cream and others), but the releases in most cases are incomplete (for example, of the 275 songs Beatles performed for BBC only 52 were released on the 1994 "Live at the BBC" album).
I'm keeping my fingers no legal barriers will stop the music appearing online.
Andrius
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Re:Are you sure it's tea?
Only if the brewing timing is right. Use my teatimer(written in Java) to make sure you do not miss the right moment.
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Re:Quit using C/C++, lose the buffer overflows
Hee!!
I've only had to muck with VB once. A truly horrific goulash it is.
Bruce McKinney said it best. Unfortunately the original article seems to be among the lost. This is as close as I could get: Slashdot, 1999:
'Bruce McKinney, author of of Hardcore Visual Basic has announced that he's fed up with VB and won't be writing a 3rd edition of his book. The best quote is at the end: "I don't need a language designed by a focus group".
See also VB or not VB.
Truth in rant: I can't say I like any existing OS, nor any language, though I have a certain perverse fondness for APL, probably 'cause I'm not smart enough. (Where else can you invert an 8 dimensional matrix in three characters?) Back in the day, I used to say "NextStep is the OS I dislike the least."
I hope the conversion goes well. PHP by some accounts is a fairly easy language to convert VB into. Biggest problem you'll have is the different mindset. -
Re:Quit using C/C++, lose the buffer overflows
Hee!!
I've only had to muck with VB once. A truly horrific goulash it is.
Bruce McKinney said it best. Unfortunately the original article seems to be among the lost. This is as close as I could get: Slashdot, 1999:
'Bruce McKinney, author of of Hardcore Visual Basic has announced that he's fed up with VB and won't be writing a 3rd edition of his book. The best quote is at the end: "I don't need a language designed by a focus group".
See also VB or not VB.
Truth in rant: I can't say I like any existing OS, nor any language, though I have a certain perverse fondness for APL, probably 'cause I'm not smart enough. (Where else can you invert an 8 dimensional matrix in three characters?) Back in the day, I used to say "NextStep is the OS I dislike the least."
I hope the conversion goes well. PHP by some accounts is a fairly easy language to convert VB into. Biggest problem you'll have is the different mindset. -
Re:Brasil - MY countryan example : in the 1800s, Paraguay was a GREAT , RICH country. so great and rich that it was threatening England ! so england financed a war and created reasons (remember the US report on Iraq weapons ? ) so Brazil could fight Paraguay. the war that destroied Paraguay and made Brazil forever knee deep in debts
...The impression that I got from reading about the War of the Triple Alliance was that "Mariscal" Solano Lopez of Paraguay was a vainglorious fool. One only needs a map of South America to see that if (1) you're Paraguay and (2) you're at war with Brazil, then (3) you'd better not piss off Argentina.
And Lopez, well, he pissed off Argentina. With enemies on all sides but the West, and the Gran Chaco and the Andes in that direction, Paraguay didn't have a chance.
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Screenshot of FVWM!Ok, here is a screenshot.
No, its not KDE, or Gnome, and it's on *Cough* Mandrake, not Redhat, and it's FVWM (whew).But, IMHO it's better than KDE (or Gnome), and you can get all the free support you need in the fully commented file shown in MozillaFirebird's url area in the screenshot.
Now for the fun part: Run this screenshot at 800x600 fullscreen on Opera (F11) and then tell your roommate that You've Just Installed Linux! See!Of course the jig's up when the buttons don't work...
Yes, I know, don't actually run this thing as "root". Well, then here's your "user"
.fvwm2rc -
Prior Art
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Re:Focus on impact craters
Definitely. Impact craters give clues about:
How recently were different parts of Mars resurfaced by flooding, weather, etc.
How long has the Martian surface remained unchanged, compared to Earth and other planets and moons
The distribution and characteristics of different ejecta morphologies (the shape of the blanket of material thrown around the crater by the impact) across the planet has been used to chart the depth and location of subsurface water and ice.
Craters which appear to contain sediments from ancient lakes have been studied as potential landing sites for future sample return missions.
A good site to read about crater classification
I would particularly suggest the south part of the planet, which is heavily cratered. The Noachis area makes a particularly interesting site.
I also run accross this good website with some basics in computer vision to automate the crater classification task! -
Re:Not Very New - Indeed it isn'tI'm calling prior art on your PBS show. I remember an episode of Macgyyver some time ago where he reconstructed a woman's face from a skull with eraser bits and putty.
I'm not kidding, here's the episode synopsis, with pictures: The Secret of Parker House [geocities]. -
Would you kill your mother for gov't health care?
Don't you want people to be able to read that "No Tespassing" sign on your barbed wire fence.
And I'll take my point about spending on state-sponsored education as given. ;^)
But seriously, folks, aren't there limits to what you want from the state? (Western and Northern Europeans need not respond here. Enjoy your "cradle to grave" welfare societies.*) Sure, pave the roads, and keep the bloodthirsty Canadians at bay; but, given the current state of the world economy, are you sure that you don't want to generate your own "barter notes your trade for food"? I usually use a Mastercard, anyway.
There are some things that I want a State to do: anything involving physical force (police, military), I'd be uncomfortable with in private hands (except for my own private army... bwah Ha ha!). But banks, stamps, mail, building hyperintelligent bending robots, going to the moon - why couldn't those be reasonably held outside of the public sector?
P.J. O'Rourke says it best in his article, "Would you kill your mother to pave I-95?", "The other secret to balancing the budget is to remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay your taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot. Thus, I -- in my role as citizen and voter -- am going to shoot you -- in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck -- if you don't pay your share of the national tab. Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, "Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?""
Would you kill your mother for "mail... barter notes ... people to be able to read ... stamps to get money to pay for your tv set?" Would you?
* (okay, that was blatant flamebait, but please tell me if I'm wrong...) -
broken jaw, fractured sinus.. yeah, rain hurts
I wrecked this car and fractured my sinus and ocular, as well as my jaw. I can tell you that I usually get major headaches before it rains, snows, etc. Many times these will last for several days as the pressure slowy drops bit by bit, up to 3 days before a rain.
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Re:SCO: Skanky Crack hO
I did it just for the crack skanking
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Fifth Generation Nonsense AgainThe Japanese are wise in their attempt to deal with an aging population via automation rather than immigration but they are foolish to do it in another Apollo-style project. They tried this already and it was destructive to their technical base and to ours.
Around 1980 the man who had told me I could work on getting PLATO to the mass market (thus drawing me away from working on an 8086 operating system on CDC Cyber emulation before the first silicon had been etched) ran into the system programmers' room in Arden Hills, MN and excitedly told us that the big new challenge was to beat the Japanese at their recently announced "Fifth Generation Computing" initiative -- which was supposed to do things like give us AI, robots, etc... etc... I was even invited to join the newly formed Microelectronics & Computing Consortium which would have required that I abandon the work to bring PLATO to the mass market. I refused the offer and ended up being disappointed that CDC's management didn't follow through when presented with the scale and economy of systems/networking (cable/phone/etc.) required to meet mass market demands of the era.
So the mass marketing of networking was delayed a decade or two while Cyc (a spin-off of MCC) attempted to solve the 'common sense' computing problem. What they did was create a cool logic programming system with persistence but not the 'common sense' solution predicted by the Japanese or the supporters of industrial policy in the US.
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- the future of all this stuff is solving the rational programming problem deriving from Russell and Whitehead's vision of a relation arithmetic.
PS: Ask yourself why there has yet to be a programming language that uses dimensions and their units as an integral aspect of types? Statistics apply to anything.
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Re:Call the editor!
You state
The fact is that the Johannine comma doesn't appear in any Greek manuscript of the first millennium.
You are very selective in the points that you answer; I see you ignored the strongest by far argument for the Johannine comma, in fact you (in the quote above) utterly denied their existence.
Actually, I did respond to this, but I'll go into more detail below.
So once again:
The current edition of the UBSNT (critical text) shows 6 (61, 88mg, 429mg, 629, 636mg, and 918) with the Johannine Comma. There are at least twenty more MSS with the Johannine Comma in them, some of those are 61, 88mg, 629, 634mg, 636mg, omega 110, 429mg, 221, and 2318. Two lectionaries also have it (60 and 173).
As I said, there are no Greek manuscripts from the first millennium with the Johannine Comma. The manuscripts you mentioned are relatively recent ones. I found the following dates on this page:
61, Codex Monfortianus 16th cent. (Metzger), C.1250 (Adam Clarke)
88mg, (margins) Codex Regius of Naples, 12th Century
429mg, (margins) Codex Wolfenbuettel, 14th Century
629, Codex Ottobonianus, 14th or 15th cent.
636mg, (margins) Naples, a variant reading, 16th century,
918, Escorial, 16th century,
omega 110, Codex Ravianus (also called Berolinensis), 16th Century.
221, (margins) - Bodleian Library, Oxford, a 10th century manuscript with a variant reading dated to the 15th or 16th Century
2318. (margins) A Bucharest manuscript, thought to have been influenced by the Clementine Vulgate. Dated to the eighteenth-century, though I did come across a date of 1592.
60 (lectionary) (AD 1021)
In many of these, the Comma appears only in the margins of the Bible, and not in the actual text.
It is also mentioned by Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and Jerome.
Again, these are Latin writers, and so they would have been able to read Latin manuscripts that contained the Comma. The Comma did not appear in early Greek manuscripts.
About the sources you keep demanding for the information about "Innocent" III; again, see the Catholic source I provided you.
So if you have this proof that Innocent III ordered the killing at Beziers, why don't you actually provide it? Either do so, or apologize.
You claim that there are quotes from the sepuagint; my point here is that the greek text of the LXX would have been very easy to align with the extant Greek manuscripts of the NT, making it appear to later generations that the order was LXX first, NT second instead of the other way around. The fact that they have identical wording only proves that one was taken from the other, not the order in which that was done.
The Septuagint is about 300 years older than the New Testament. Manuscripts of the Septuagint dating from before Christ have been found in Qumran.
You keep twisting points to try to defend tradition, yet while the Lord quoted often from the OT, can you show once that he quoted from tradition
Nice try, but the verses I provided are sufficient to show that Catholic oral Tradition (the passing down of the teachings of the Apostles by word) is mentioned in the Bible.
However, since you ask, this page mentions a few cases of Jewish oral tradition in the New Testament, including an example of Jewish oral tradition used by Jesus (Matthew 23:2-3).
(other than the times he chastised the religious hierarchy for tradition)?
He chastised them for their manmade traditions, not for passing down authentic teachings. -
Re:I prefer this picture.... sco driveby, etc...
Added some more.... enjoy. Thanks to ennui for the driveby. http://www.geocities.com/artiste242
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I prefer this picture....
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Darwin award honorable mention...
I do not believe that no one has submitted this yet, but this should definitely be mentioned. Check Item #3 under "SOME MORE ALSO RAN".
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Re:I agree
Hi
guys this is me, my name is Steve. I am going to tell you my
story. I was born in 1981 in the month of October, the 7th
day. I am a Libra. Well I had a pretty normal childhood, in
school I was not good. I wasn't good at the homework and I was
even worse at making friends. I never had any friends ever at
all. I graduated High Schoool in 2000. At this time I was
happy that I could go out in the "REAL" World and meet some "nice"
people. After school I started working at Funco Land, they
changed there name and are now known as Gamestop ,
I worked there from June 2000-July 2002. In August of 2000 I met a girl
on the internet. She lived a few states away and I drove to meet
her for sexual intercourse. I only met her once, and I only had
sexual intercourse with her once. That was the first time I ever
had sexual intercourse. It was also the last. I never
talked to the girl after we had sex. Than all of the suddan in
July 2002 she instant messages me. She tells me she has AIDS, she
says she doesn't know when she got it and that she thought she might of
got it from me. I told her no way, she was the first girl I was
with, THE ONLY GIRL. Well anyway I set up a appointment for the
docter and get tested for H.I.V. guess what? I GOT H.I.V.
Right now I'm kinda sad that I ruined my life just for sex, it wasn't
even that great. I just made this page to let people know not to
meet girls on the internet, if a girl will meet a guy from the internet
she is obviously crazy, and can't get guys in normal life. I met
one of these crazy girls and she gave me H.I.V. don't ruin your life
for some internet booty. Ok if you wanna be my friend email me -
Re:Good griefwhat you really need is a wireless power distribution set up. there's one here:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/9654/
t esla/projecttesla.html -
Re:Gravity and Heat
By 'we', you mean you and the publishers of various UFO magazines?
Perhaps he refers to the majority of people who realize that they can only observe a relatively small portion of the universe. And anyone with common-sense can easily realise the 90% figure is used metaphorically so get a clue.
And what UFO magazine did you pull "dyson spheres" out of? Its a pretty safe assumption that dyson spheres won't make up any of the so-called "dark matter" out there.
Perhaps some people really need to read a bit more, some suggested material:
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Re:How do I make Windows Stop Listening?I still rely on a personal firewall to stealth ports 135 and 445, but there is an awful lot of unneccessary stuff one can easily shut down, especially when not on a LAN... Telnet, SSDP Discovery Service & Universal PnP Device Host, Server & Computer Browser & anything NetBIOS-related, anything with "remote" in it except for Remote Access Connection Manager, Alerter & Messenger, etcetera. For starters see
-- briefly explains each service rather than just telling you what to turn off next. It's pretty lenient, though. Maybe you should set everything to "manual", try to do your usual things, and reactivate services as needed.
Also interesting:
XP from A-Z (fairly detailed, though not on services)
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Pirates?
I figured it was about One Piece
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Here's my 2 cents
Fucking posers. Y'all know shit about IT. Come knockin' on my door the day you'll hack the Pentagon, and maybe we'll discuss. Until then, y'all can suck my motherfuckin' dick.
Douche Baggy Bagg 4 Prez, biatch ! -
Re:The Internet model
Can you make me some magic with your own two hands?
Can you build an endless city with these grains of sand?
You do realize that you're quoting MeatLoaf, right? -
Re:It's RIGHT to use 3D functionality for 2D graphOn vaugley modern hardware the 3D path is so much faster than the 2D path that it ends up being significantly faster to use the 3D path to render your desktop if your desktop is at all complicated (not a dozen mono xterms).
But a GUI is not composed of (overlapping) polygons.
This ends up being even more true if you do any sort of complex compositing (eg: alpha blending,
Alpha blending is a mistake for GUIs.
hardware accelerated mpeg / video
Windows does fine accelerated video, even with cards with 2d functionality only.
openGL windows, etc, etc).
Rendering OpenGL within a Window has nothing to do with the 3d hardware(especially the Window part). You can render 3d using the video card's 3d engine, but the rest of the GUI (which is composed of windows) does fine with 2D.
Enlightenment uses alpha channels, it would be fater to composite in hardware than software.
Translucency is wrong in a GUI. Believe me.
These sorts of operations are not accelerated at all on the 2d path, and have to be done in software.
You only mentioned two: alpha blending, which is irrelevant to GUIs, and hardware MPEG decompression, which has nothing to do with 3d.
Go check out Quartz Extreme at http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.
h tml (excuse the space in html).I read it. Plain BS. Here is why:
Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on screen
And why is that ? just to have drop shadows and translucency ? I certainly don't want translucency, as it is a pain in the ass to work with translucent windows...Windows have very nice antialiasing (ClearType)...I don't need anything else, and I certainly don't need to make each window a texture and waste all the memory.
The graphics processor focuses on what it does best -- graphics -- freeing the Power PC chip to do more operations in the same amount of time
I agree that custom chips should handle trivial things, but why 3D? this functionality should have been incorporated in the 2D engine.
The new Quartz delivers device-independent and resolution-independent rendering of anti-aliased text, bitmap images and vector graphics
Windows does that already.
addition, Quartz can both save and print transparency and the Preview application honors PDF file security. A "Save as PDF" button in the Print dialog streamlines PDF creation
What does a graphic engine have to do with file security ???
Jaguar adds more high-quality fonts to the already exquisite collection, so those who use non-Roman languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Thai can communicate in their native tongue
Nothing Windows does not have a long time now.
Basically, you don't seem to know how a gui works. Since I have made a complete Window System, I can tell you that it's a big waste of resources to redraw things in a texture, then use 3D to compose the screen.
Of course, you are a proud Mac owner. I can understand that(I just don't understand why you were modded as 4).
Having used Xfree86 and Quartz extreme on the same graphics hardware, I can tell you there's no comparison. Quartz is much faster and much more capable.
Then blame XFree86, don't throw it on the lack of 3D under Linux. XFree86 does not have as a good font rendering as Windows or MacOS, and that is a problem. The other stuff you are mentioning is kiddie's stuff(alpha blending, although impressive, it's like giving candies to children: good for psychological reasons, bad for anything else).
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Re:But...
Where do I put all my coke cans...?
In the cupholder that comes out of the front of the computer of course! -
Re:I thought this was common knowledge?I got a copy of this article and put it on the web in a format that us Windows users can read.
Todd
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Re:outages like this
When you say "I'm sure a cleverly-placed explosive can make it happen much more easily.", aren't you referring to the "it" as being the mindset of chaos?
Chaos as we know it, aside from being a powerful support mechanism of sekrit agents worlwide, serves to confuse the population and gradually erodes the previously-existing popular mindset. -
Re:Could replace personal computers
I already have replaced my "personal computer" with a PDA.
Over the years, I've slowly been moving more and more of what I do to a PDA. The first PDA I had which I used like a small personal computer was a Newton 2100u. On it I could do many things- develop NewtonOS applications, browse the web, SSH/telnet, write and compiled papers with a TeX subset, word process in NewtWorks, admin via VNC, email, Usenet, print my documents via the network or IrDA and play some games. And I could do it all via ethernet or an 802.11b connection without having to ever sync or dock with a Mac/PC. I still turned to my Mac or PC for some tasks- more complex web browsing and coding in Squeak Smalltalk. Since Squeak is pretty much my desktop, I didn't use the MP2100 at home- where my regular computer is- as much as I did when out of the house.
Since the MP2100, I've had a few other PDAs. For the last year, I owned a Jornada 720 that became even more my main machine. On it, I could do all of the stuff I listed above that I did on the Newton, and more. I no longer had to turn to the iBook for some web browsing- IE for WinCE [1] handled the vast majority of webpages without any problems. I could even run Java applets. I could also do all the Unixey stuff I wanted as well- write and run Perl/Tk apps, as well as write non-gui apps in python, ruby, REBOL, and others. And, with the switch to Windows CE, I was also able to develop, compile, test and run code in Squeak Smalltalk- all on the device. The J720 has a nice keyboard, something on which you can touch type. After a couple days of first getting it, I was able to type just about as fast as I could on my desktop.
And just recently, I've obtained a Sharp Zaurus SL-C760. For one, it has a 640x480 screen- incredible. Awesome for web browsing. I have Opera and NetFront on it, and both (via wifi or usbnet) load pages about as fast as I'm used to on a desktop on IE or Safari. And luckily, I can still do Squeak on this machine. And thanks to the wide memory bus and fast CPU, Squeak is damned fast- thanks to Dynapad, a Squeak-based PDA environment is available now. Like the SL-5x00, software is pretty spotty for the Zaurus, but I don't need anything from the Qtopia environment other than a web browser. It's kind of funny- I had more well adapted Unix ports running under Windows CE than I can find for the Zaurus under Qtopia. Sure, it's easy to just do a recompile and run the app under X11 or the console, but the interface is entirely ill-suited for the device.
Yes, the Zaurus C760 is very expensive. But since I've had it, I've pretty much given my girlfriend the iBook. Unlike the J720, which had a really good keyboard (Psion quality), the C760 has a thumboard. OK for entering names and dates, but not for much more. So I bought a PockeTop keyboard and am now back in business using this PDA as my main computer. What more can I ask for? It runs Squeak pretty damned well and has the most full-featured and fast web browsers you can get on any PDA, and one of the best browsing experiences I've had on *any* computer.
This school year will tell whether or not the Zaurus cuts it, but I have high expectations. With the new version of qpdf, I can finally read the articles I get from professors, which was a *huge* barrier when I owned a SL-5500.
I went through a few other PDAs in between- an iPAQ 3150, Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, and a Dell Axim X5 Basic. None of them could cut it. The SL-5500 was a huge disapointment in a number of areas- screen was total shite, battery life horrible, and there are few decent applications. The Axim was a good machine, but after having been used to bigger screens for my whole PDA career, I just couldn't downgrade to a wee 240x320 screen. (although the Dell has the brightest and sharpest 240x320 screen I've seen!)
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I love these arguments...
Nothing brings out more baseless and uninformed opinions than a copyright argument. Basically, copyright law is one gigantic joke, and if you think what seems insane is impossible simply because it seems insane, then you are truly misguided. Personally, I am affriad of what this could lead to. There have been plenty of insane judgements in copyright cases. It seems to me copyright law is essentially just a big game of Calvinball played in court. This scares me.
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Re:No, not "good!"
Mutt is text-based, can't easily import the messages that I already have, and does not work under Windows -- which is the primary OS that I use personally and professionally. Therefore, it does not meet my needs.
Whilst I don't know enough about your need to know if mutt meets them, it is available for Windows: http://www.geocities.com/win32mutt/win32.html
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Re:Just cross your eyes!
In order for your brain to properly "fuse" the images together, your eyes will have to perform some tiresome calisthenics
Ah, no, the whole point is that you'll focus in front of the screen where the virual object will appear, as clearly depicted in figure 1. Because your eyes will be crossed, the image to be sent to your right eye will perforce be presented on the left side of the screen, and vice versa for the left eye. ...You've missed something: yes, you'll be focusing in front of the screen on the virtual object, because your eyes are crossed. But the problem is, you actually need to be focusing a good deal further from you than that -- on the screen -- in order to have the image in focus. To do that, you have to overcome a lifetime of association between how much your eyes are crossed and where your eyes are focused -- and that's the "tiresome calisthenics".
Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, mind you -- once you get used to it, it's really not so tiresome. Here's a neat little image I rendered that makes use of this technique. It's also a great way to really see faraway scenerey like mountains. For example, I take one picture of Half Dome, then walk 50 feet to the left, and take another; at home, I put the two prints side-by-side, and I can see it in 3D! It also works pretty well out airplane windows, since you're looking perpendicular to the line of travel.
But anyways, the original poster is right -- the cellophane is really not a significant step beyond the simple eye-crossing technique by itself.
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Re:The motivation is a tad depressing
only to have arisen/regenerated with the influence of competitive international politics. Are we really so hardly advanced that our respective national egos are still the driving force behind enthusiasm, financial or otherwise, in certain areas of science?
Certain areas of science? Our egos, national or otherwise, are the driving force behind pretty much everything. Make a baby, jump on a grenade, write a kernel patch... Ego, pal. Get over it.
Besides, there is nothing a noble as ego driving this. Sandia knows how to keep the budget bucks flowing. The supercomputer-gap is no different than the many preceding variants of the missle-gap. The real competition here is between all of the various potential beneficiaries of public largess attempting to get their collective mouths around the giant, swollen teat that is the Federal budget.
A highly tailored Japanese machine was able to post better numbers on a specific application than a general purpose machine. Big deal. Russian engineers made effective radar systems for military aircraft using vacuum tubes. News at 11: Custom hardware can do amazing things! -
You're forgetting Dr. Forrester
As an official Mad Scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester and his experiments on the Satellite of Love (continued by his mother Pearl) show the fallacy of your contention that no research is "bad" or "evil".
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More DirecTV Abuses
This site provides full disclosure of exploits that allow an attacker to "hijack" your DirecTV, cancel your service, change your service options, view information about the equipment you have in your home, and so on. DTV was notified of this back in April, but they haven't done a damn thing about it since.
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More DirecTV Abuses
This site provides full disclosure of exploits that allow an attacker to "hijack" your DirecTV, cancel your service, change your service options, view information about the equipment you have in your home, and so on. DTV was notified of this back in April, but they haven't done a damn thing about it since.
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Re:The bloat curse
Absolutely. Why do we need 15+ different toolkits (I'm not exagerating, count them sometime.) My theory goes like this.
Toolkit programmers like all us geeks are antisocial and tend to think that others around them are dolts. So they naturally choose to write Their Better Toolkit (tm). Because they Can Do It Better.
Then these Better toolkits get a small following of cowed developers that all think that their particular toolkit is the best (mostly because it's the first one they learned.)
The success or failure of a given toolkit will depend on how much indirect marketing the Cowed developers do for the given toolkit.
Thus... we get this list of toolkits available for linux. -
Would you be willing to drop out?IMO, 200ish names on a single ballot item is flat out insane. It makes the Infamous Butterfly look like an elegant masterpiece. If a decent number of the other "minor" candidates opted to drop out and endorse a larger-name candidate with similar views, would you consider doing the same?
Why (/not), and what other candidate(s) would you endorse?
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Re:As /. has clearly shown
Attributed to, yeah.
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Re:Third Time's a Charm?
Yeah, so the deal is this site is essentially as it was back in 1993. I am recreating the whole site as we speak.Keep a copy somewhere for an online museum!
Sorry... usually a site like that is designed by teenage girls using Geocities accounts to post tributes to their favorite teen idol. Flaming them for their animated GIFs, horrible background, and MIDI assaults when I accidentally happen onto their pages is, of course, pointless. I guess I had a lot of built-up tension. Sorry.
Ever heard the Growing Pains theme in MIDI? Urk. B.J. Thomas and Jennifer Warnes must not be impressed.